My great-grandmother, witness, Josephine/Giuseppina Coccaro

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Contributed by : Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani

Object # 963

1993

I’m an Italian-Jewish New Yorker, from a family of New Yorkers. 6 months into our project to create this Open Archive, my great-uncle Richard told me what Momma, my great-grandmother Josephine, saw. In 1911, she lived on Thompson Street in an apartment heated by a stove that burned the scrap wood from the factories’ discarded boxes. On March 25, 1911, Josephine was collecting wood from the factories around Washington Place. She saw the start of the terrible fire, and heard the fire engines coming. Here she is at 100.